Err - I hate to break it to you, but this is Dashcode, and it's been shipping for several years.

Good product, but I still use NetBeans and Eclipse for most things. I even got them running perfectly on My Asus Slider. I'm so close to having my entire development environment on a tablet. I hope one day Apple will release a iPad Pro with OSX for tablet. Until such time I really don't mind having my work tablet being a Android 4.04 device and my play device having iOS 5.1 installed, well actually I have two play devices there is another Android tablet for my media. I like both platforms.

When I looked up "Ninjas" in Thesaurus.com, it said "Ninja's can't be found" Well played Ninjas, well played.

I more so mean the patent application...not the tool itself...I think the tool is a decent idea though I can see a flood of subpar apps in the appstore but then again since Apple is constructing the bones it'll probably look good.

We'll see.

So what exactly are they patenting here? I didn't read the 72 page report but as far as I can tell I can't see much that's worth patenting. A time axis for sticking animations on? Is that even patentable? App templates? Maybe I am failing to see something that's there.

Maybe you can elaborate this a little further, because I fail to see how any of Apple's previous success stories offer any insights about completely unrelated endeavors such as a programming language that basically writes programs for you.

Are you implying that anything Apple tries is an automatic guarantee for success, just because they know how to build great MP3 players, phones, computers and tablets?

Wow. You have shown, clearly, that you have no idea what Apple does. Why are you even posting here?"unrelated endeavors" that really made me laugh.

Oh god no. People with no design experience should not be let anywhere near application development. Often neither should the people with no idea about programming.

As a tool, this could be nice for quickly making iOS UIs but in the hands of users with no eye for design this will just result in the app store being flooded with subpar crap on top of the subpar crap already in it.

Just look at MySpace and see what customization capability did to that.

"Oh god no. People with no design experience should not be let anywhere near application development. Often neither should the people with no idea about programming."
Uh, sorry. Those boats sailed, about, 15-20 years ago.

Wow. You have shown, clearly, that you have no idea what Apple does. Why are you even posting here?"unrelated endeavors" that really made me laugh.

Wow thanks for the magnificent insight . I almost forgot Apple has a track record and years of experience successfully revolutionizing the way computer programs are developed. I mean, things like Cocoa, Objective-C and XCode were really nothing ever seen before in the history of computers, if only because of all the fairy dust and unicorns they used to create them

How about moving away from objective c? It's a funky language. I wouldn't mind C# on LLVM/Clang with the Cocoa framework. The C# language is good but .Net is garbage.

Dynamic languages like Perl 6, Python, PHP etc... that compile to LLVM byte code and can utilize Cocoa would be great too. Haxe is picking up steam too.

The idea was to simplify - which is what this article is all about. C# is proprietary and controlled by MSoft. It is supposed to be a mix of the best of C++ and Java but the very facts that it has its roots tied to C++ instead of plain C makes it a very cumbersome language. It is non-trivial to learn and my personal feeling is it has a steeper learning curve than Obj C. C# fits the object-oriented model which is great for large to huge projects but require a large runtime library. Obj C on the other hand provides plain old C with the ability to send messages and a few other optional goodies (giving you the choice on how to manage memory and auto generation of accessors) that is built on using the MVC model.

I think Apple has made the correct choice and I see no real need to add something like c# and its large runtime libs.

For anybody interested in that kind of tool, we at appsify.me have developed a tool that enables anybody to build native and powerful iPhone apps.

It's not one of those DIY crappy app generator.Appsify.me helps non-tech people to build apps but it's mainly a complete framework targeting ios devs (pro or amateur), to help them speed up their development process.

If interested, we've been in beta for almost a year now, and will be going live in less than a month.
Thought it'd be useful for some of you.

I hate to break it to AppleInsider (and everyone else here hoping for some new app). This patent is for iAd Producer, which has been out for over a year and a half. The guys at Apple are laughing their collective asses off at the attention/speculation about this "recently unearthed patent app."

Apple should concentrate on making XCode suck less. A ruby/rails programmer can code up something about 5x to 10x faster than an objective-C programmer, and that is mainly due to the bad toolset. I often see my Objective C partners struggling with Xcode.

You just don't get "the Apple Experience" as an Objective C programmer, it is more like what you get from Microsoft - crappy, buggy, non-intuitive tools and code.

Eventually, if they don't make it better, then sencha touch and javascript mobile will take over the whole iOS app market.

I could not believe that after reading through all the posts on this topic that not one person would remember or know about an application called Authorware. Macromedia released this in the late 90s. I think Adobe eventually bought Macromedia.

I used it for several years and it used a similar paradigm to enable non-programmers such as myself to quickly create custom apps. I built several working simulators that we used to help train employees.

It worked great and we were on our way to simulate a custom printing press when the bottom of the economy dropped out in early 2001. It had the same ability to allow programmers to enhance any area that needed their expertise.